Labour’s bizarre pride at repeating Boris’s ticket office mistake

Today’s Standard carries a piece claiming Boris and Transport for London have a secret plan to close every Tube ticket office.

The ‘plan’ doesn’t seem that different from the one which has been doing the rounds for years but has prompted a rather excited response from Labour’s Shadow London Minister and claimed Mayoral hopeful Sadiq Khan.

The Standard only carries some of Khan’s statement, but I’ve copied the whole thing below:

“Boris Johnson and TfL must come clean about their plans. The revelations will have a devastating effect on the daily commute.

“Every Londoner has had to depend on staffed ticket offices when the machines are out of order or their Oyster card has stopped working. Under the Mayor’s plans you will now have nowhere to turn in these everyday situations.”

”Commuters will also understandably feel less safe using deserted stations late at night, particularly older customers and children.”

”Boris Johnson pledged to keep a ticket office open at every tube station in his manifesto. These revelations are a complete betrayal of that promise. Every journey should matter to the Mayor and he must not go ahead with these plans that ignore the needs and safety of hard working Londoners.

“As the Mayor said in his own manifesto ‘there is little financial, strategic or common sense in these closures’.”

Of course, people within parties do disagree with one another. But I can’t recall Khan opposing ticket office closures when Ken first proposed them.

I’m also not convinced about the implied Labour line that ticket offices should be kept open even when they’re not being used.

As with police front counters and fire stations, insisting unused ticket offices remain open leaves London Labour looking as if they’re ignoring shifting usage patterns and economic realities simply for the easy headline.

Some may think this makes for great opposition politics but it’s actually a pretty shortsighted strategy if you’re hoping to take power either in Whitehall or City Hall in the next couple of years.

What’s truly terrifying about Labour’s patting themselves on the back for the cleverness in opposing this six years old, much reported secret plan, is the fact that they’re making exactly the same error Boris did in 2008.

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Comments

The whole ticket office closure plan even predates Ken’s election in 2000, the whole point of Oyster was to reduce the need for staff in TOs. What you neglected to mention was that while Ken was happy to go along with LUL’s plans he wanted to increase station staff with more people to help passengers (customers in TfL speak) at the ticket machines and around the stations.

Despite his pre-election promise that every ticket office would stay open Boris agreed to ticket office closures, a reduction in opening hours and staff reductions which led to a joint RMT/TSSA strike in 2010, the first time TSSA had been out on the Tube since 1928. The greatest moral victory was not down to the unions but to the residents of Chesham where the ticket office was set to be closed at weekends but the local outcry was so intense that LUL agreed to keep it open a couple of hours each morning.

The only thing stopping minimal station staff on the Tube is the King’s Cross fire, the legislation that followed that requires that Section 12 stations, those that are below ground level, have a minimum staffing level. The rule of thumb is that in order to open you need enough staff to evacuate the station in 5 minutes in an emergency. Certain managers who’ve never worked on a station say this can be reduced by the use of CCTV and PA systems but then they’ve never had to deal with a bunch of Chinese tourists on the platform whose grasp of English does not extend to “please leave the station or you will die”.

I moved from stations to train ten years ago because I saw this coming.

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